The Salem hypothesis is an old chestnut from talk.origins. It was proposed by a fellow named Bruce Salem who noticed that, in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering degree. The hypothesis predicted situations astonishingly well—in the bubbling ferment of talk.origins, there were always new creationists popping up, pompously declaiming that they were scientists and they knew that evolution was false, and subsequent discussion would reveal that yes, indeed, they were the proud recipient of an engineering degree.
Stating the Salem hypothesis was also a good way of stirring the pot, because there are always engineers around who have not succumbed to creationist nonsense, and they’d get all huffy and denounce the very idea. Of course, it doesn’t say that engineers are all creationists: it says that creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers, a completely different thing altogether.
Here’s an excellent example of the Salem hypothesis in the form of letters to the Electronic Engineering Times. Engineers, your honor is safe: for every foolish declaration that organisms are examples of design, there are a couple of sharply worded smackdowns.
As a Biomedical Engineer, it amazes me how people can still hold to creationism, but I’ve been in a Microbiology for Biomedical Engineers class where students complain about evolution being presented matter-of-factly as an explanation for the development of and similarity between homologous proteins. How can they still hold to this? This was a third-year class, and the students had presumably been through one semester of Intro Bio and two semesters of Anat. and Phys., plus several other science electives.
Just because someone is intelligent and/or has been through biology classes doesn’t mean that person will not be a creationist.
Hm, are there any creationist engineers out there who would allow “God in the gaps” of their bridges or steel frameworks? You mean that they, even they, apply a strict naturalistic worldview, shutting out any possibility of miracles, when designing an office tower? The blasphemers.
A lot of creationists also seem to be veterinarians. What’s up with that?
I’m interested to see that try/select/recombine/retry algorithms are used in the real world. In the 90s I did a lot of casual work with genetic algorithms, but never stumbled across a serious use within the context of my own interests. I’m very pleased to see some variation is apparently now mainstream manufacturing methodology.
I see that phenomenon in a lot of areas. The engineer says, “I am an engineer and I can figure out anything.” Of course, I think he then looks at a new area and says, “What’s the rule of thumb here?”
When I was in graduate school, I wanted a minor that happened to be offered in the civil engineering school. When I talked to one of the administrators, he was afraid I would try to pass myself off as an engineer. I was dumbstruck. If it happened today I would fall down laughing.
Is this a case of engineers creating a god in their own image?
*rimshot* to kenneth
I imagine that engineers with more knowledge of biology look at living things and think “I could’ve done a far better job of that”.
When I was in graduate school, I wanted a minor that happened to be offered in the civil engineering school. When I talked to one of the administrators, he was afraid I would try to pass myself off as an engineer.
Those of us who are chemical engineers (like me) or mechanical engineers or electrical engineers often scoff at the idea that civil “engineers” try to pass themselves off as engineers.
As a structural engineer, I have to disagree with the second part of the hypothesis as listed in wikipedia. It kinda smacks of the old way-to-piss-off-a-cop joke “Not all cops with mustaches are gay, but all gay cops have mustaches.” Wiki does mention that the typical usage is more humorous nowadays so I’ll unbunch my panties now…
Many of my fellow civil engineers are religious and I think that informs their views on evolution more than them seeing a machine in nature. ID is the cause celeb, but these are folks who have opposed evolution for quite some time.
Oh & of course, we rely on nothing but the Bible to help us determine how to make the bridges & buildings stand! It’s the only book you need! (kidding)
? about The Bobs’ comment
How are civil engineers not engineers?
Doesn’t it make sense that engineers would be tempted to fall into the Creationist trap, though? Engineers don’t observe natural things; they design artificial things. When they observe things at all, it is to try to reverse engineer something designed by someone else.
Very funny, Bobs. I wish I could have used that back in the day. My brother, who I consider a scientist, got his PhD in ChE.
I’m an engineer who has frequently gone on record as agreeing with the Salem Hypothesis (suitably nuanced). There’s a number of contributing psycho-social factors that one can speculate about, my favorite one being “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Engineers learn enough about the results of science to be tempted to think they understand science itself. Then they go read Behe and he’s talking their language about motors and processes and so on, and so they create a God^H^H^HDesigner in their own image. Personally, I think an engineer should put down the book as soon as Behe admits he can’t even set his VCR clock — it suggests to me that he’s not really comfortable enough with machinery to be drawing useful analogies between macroscopic human machines and natural molecular ones.
I’m interested to see that try/select/recombine/retry algorithms are used in the real world.
I don’t know about GAs as it’s not my field, but I believe Simulated Annealing (another stochastic optimization technique with some similarities) was used for integrated circuit layout as long ago as the 1980s.
I think this type of thinking is elitism at its worst, and I have expounded upon my arguments here.
This is often the case with enviro-denialism. There’s no shortage of op-eds from engineers who think they can dabble in atmospheric science as some sort of parlor game. Only economists are worse.
by which I mean here. (sorry, html weirdness)
I was about to suggest that unlike experimental scientists, engineers can become very skilled in their discipline without ever grasping the scientific method. So the point isn’t that engineers are especially prone, but that everyone else with technical expertise is ruled out. This would also explain the extension of this rule to mathematicians, who use logic rather than the scientific method as their criteria–making their results rigorous but more limited in scope than our body of scientific knowledge.
On the other hand, it could also be a mere cultural artifact. For whatever reason, it seems that pure research is culturally more liberal and secular in this country than applications. Engineers find most of their gainful employment outside of universities. Even those based in universities probably see their mission differently as well. This might correlate to different views of religion.
It would be interesting to test the hypothesis using rigorous statistical methods instead of anecdote. I would be curious if it holds true in any other industrial countries or is a particularly American phenomenon.
As an engineer who works with a large number of other engineers, I have to report that creationist engineers must be awfully rare; I don’t know a single one personally.
This all points to a language usage question that really ought to be addressed. IDiots (and all of those who have difficulties with science) have been quite successful at creating a cultural boogeyman called the “scientist.” And since learning science can be difficult and often beyond the reach and grasp (or desire to expend the effort) of the average Joe, the “truths” that science offers can be looked on with skepticism by Joe since he doesn’t have the background, it all sounds too complicated, his church says otherwise, and he certainly doesn’t want to be seen as a dupe. So “scientists” are broad-brushed into a vague cabal of knowledge dispensers who may or may not be trusted and may or may not have evil designs to control the world. “Scientists” cannot be trusted, unless they are SCIENTISTS who question evolution.
And so I think that “scientists” need to be more precise in defining themselves. You are not a “scientist” but a mitochondrial biologist or a paleobotanist or an endocrinologist. It is easier to dismiss the statements of a “scientist” about evolution than it is to dismiss the statements of a microbiologist about evolution. When Joe begins to see the specialization and depth of knowledge that these otherwise vaguely defined “scientists” have, he may grant them more credibility. Similarly, as has been rightly pointed out, when Joe sees that some “scientists” are no more qualified to dismiss evolution than he himself is, he may begin to doubt the “authority” of the IDiots.
IMO it’s not the Engineering, its the Math background….
Libertarians lean math background as well from my experience.
Engineers learn enough about the results of science to be tempted to think they understand science itself. Then they go read Behe and he’s talking their language about motors and processes and so on, and so they create a God^H^H^HDesigner in their own image. Personally, I think an engineer should put down the book as soon as Behe admits he can’t even set his VCR clock — it suggests to me that he’s not really comfortable enough with machinery to be drawing useful analogies between macroscopic human machines and natural molecular ones.
First, enough of the overgeneralizations already…
Any good engineer understands science very well, thank you. If you want to characterize all engineers based on somebody claiming to be an engineer writing a BS op-ed piece, be prepared for biologists to be characterized based on what Behe says and mathematicians to be characterized based on what Dembski says.
On Behe’s book, I would suggest everybody read it. To anybody with any capacity for critical thinking, his own words are more than enough to illustrate that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. No reason to put it down when he says he can’t work a VCR…
If you define a good engineer as one that understands science very well, then of course good engineers understand science. That would imply that any engineer who espouses idiocy like ID is not a good engineer. I think I can live with that.
Joke I read, not to be taken seriously:
Technicians think they are engineers.
Engineers think they are physicists.
Physicists think they are mathematicians.
Mathematicians think they are philosophers.
Philosophers think they are technicians.
(Insert anecdote of a philosophy professor spraying WD-40 into his VCR.)
As an engineer, I’d like to point out that there is nothing within normal engineering education that would equip one to overcome the incredulity at the idea that random mutation and selection are capable of bringing about the diversity of life that we see today. Even after reading Dawkins’ persuasive The Selfish Gene, I was not completely convinced. It finally took this article in talk origins on genetic algorithms (especially the engineering examples in it) to convince me completely.
I think a lot of scientists in the biological fields do not fully realize how counter-intuitive the idea of evolution is. I’d guess that a large section of us layhumans simply do not comprehend the magnitude of the timescales we are talking about here. For engineers, I think examples of the principles of evolution at work (outside the natural world) would go a long way in overcoming the incredulity barrier.
I can only hope that as genetic algorithms become a more mainstream way of seeking optimum solutions in engineering design as well as other fields, the principles of evolution become as obvious to the rest of us educated folks with an open mind as they are to the scientists.
I’m one of the people with an intuitive (non-technical) understanding of evolution. It often strikes me as unusual that someone would consider it counter-intuitive. Then again, I suppose engineering is a top-down approach, while evolution is a bottom-up one.
If you define a good engineer as one that understands science very well, then of course good engineers understand science.
I think that’s a pretty important criterion. I don’t think I could consider anybody who didn’t understand science very well to be a “good engineer” under any circumstances.
That would imply that any engineer who espouses idiocy like ID is not a good engineer. I think I can live with that.
Sounds more than fair to me…
This is my favorite part about the talk.origins article, an example I use often:
“Dr. Adrian Thompson has exploited this device, in conjunction with the principles of evolution, to produce a prototype voice-recognition circuit that can distinguish between and respond to spoken commands using only 37 logic gates – a task that would have been considered impossible for any human engineer. He generated random bit strings of 0s and 1s and used them as configurations for the FPGA, selecting the fittest individuals from each generation, reproducing and randomly mutating them, swapping sections of their code and passing them on to another round of selection. His goal was to evolve a device that could at first discriminate between tones of different frequencies (1 and 10 kilohertz), then distinguish between the spoken words “go” and “stop”.
This aim was achieved within 3000 generations, but the success was even greater than had been anticipated. The evolved system uses far fewer cells than anything a human engineer could have designed, and it does not even need the most critical component of human-built systems – a clock. How does it work? Thompson has no idea, though he has traced the input signal through a complex arrangement of feedback loops within the evolved circuit. In fact, out of the 37 logic gates the final product uses, five of them are not even connected to the rest of the circuit in any way – yet if their power supply is removed, the circuit stops working. It seems that evolution has exploited some subtle electromagnetic effect of these cells to come up with its solution, yet the exact workings of the complex and intricate evolved structure remain a mystery (Davidson 1997).”
Note that the algorithm hooked up a gate with no obvious connection to the rest of the circuit, that was essential to the function!
Sounds like “macro-evolution” to me.
I’m an aerospace engineer. I can definitely understand why there would be a higher percentage of engineers buying into ID arguments than scientists, even if the scientists are in as unrelated of a field as the engineers.
An anecdote from my senior year of college – a group of us were in the study lounge discussing a problem with a professor, and the professor asked how lift is created. Almost every person recited the old, “the upper wing surface is longer than the lower wing surface” argument, which is wrong. These students were among the top of the class, and this was directly related to their field of study, but they didn’t know something so basic.
Engineers are not taught to think critically, or to understand all of the underlying mechanisms of a phenomenon. They are simply taught things as being true, and how to apply that knowledge.
Unfortunately, the “unlike experimental scientists” may not be as true as you assume. I went through graduate school with a bunch of (otherwise fairly rational) creationists.
Yes, it was the chemistry department and not the biology department, but I don’t think you could get away with saying that most chemists don’t grasp the scientific method. Ditto for physicists, and there are creationist physicists out there.
KeithB, you and Dr. Thompson just blew my mind… More than evolution usually does.
Engineers are not taught to think critically, or to understand all of the underlying mechanisms of a phenomenon. They are simply taught things as being true, and how to apply that knowledge.
I’m shocked by that statement. There must be some major disconnects in engineering education going on somewhere. Absent sharply honed critical thinking skills, how could any engineer actually come up with anything genuinely new, or recognize the difference between an unworkable new approach and a great one?
Keith B said:
“..The evolved system uses far fewer cells than anything a human engineer could have designed, and it does not even need the most critical component of human-built systems – a clock. How does it work? Thompson has no idea, though he has traced the input signal through a complex arrangement of feedback loops within the evolved circuit. In fact, out of the 37 logic gates the final product uses, five of them are not even connected to the rest of the circuit in any way – yet if their power supply is removed, the circuit stops working. It seems that evolution has exploited some subtle electromagnetic effect of these cells to come up with its solution, yet the exact workings of the complex and intricate evolved structure remain a mystery (Davidson 1997).”
How neat! How wonderfully quasi-biological. And yes, isn’t this a case of um..’irreducible complexity’?
A lot of creationists also seem to be veterinarians. What’s up with that?
There is definitely a school of thought among some religious medical practitioners that evolution is something you give lip service to as the price of admission to medical/dental/vet school, but once you’re in, that facade is over with. There have actually been some well-publicized cases over whether a prof can or should write a reco for students who make that position clear in their class.
I imagine that engineers with more knowledge of biology look at living things and think “I could’ve done a far better job of that”.
Heh. Back when I worked at Microsoft, there were some software engineers on our team who clearly thought that our users were poorly optimized.
First, enough of the overgeneralizations already…
OK, guilty. I’ve been grappling to come up with a reason for this phenomenom (assuming it’s real ;-) for years now, and not getting much closer. And I was joking about dropping Behe’s book over the VCR thing (after all, I did finish the book myself). I just took that anecdote as an early omen — which turned out to be correct. I think it suggests that he’s just sort of dazzled by complexity; he’s got a mental block there.
There is a flip-side to this problem — most layhumans don’t understand that one major purpose of science is to overcome intuitive but incorrect understandings of nature. If nature were always intuitive, science would be among the basket-weaving disciplines. Most people think they understand evolution — and most people are dead wrong about that (this is absolutely not limitted to creationists in my experience.)
The problem with intuition is that it’s based on experience, and not many of us have direct experience with evolution, not to mention quantum physics. I have seen interviews with some top physicists who say they do not really have any intuitive understanding of some phenomena, cannot, for example, truly visualize higher dimensions; they do the math. It’s almost as if they can speak a language fluently but cannot understand it.
Mark Paris: if you can’t visialise a process in 9 dimensions, try visualising it in n dimensions first, and then let n= 9.
(Sorry, old mathematician joke…)
“most layhumans don’t understand that one major purpose of science is to overcome intuitive but incorrect understandings of nature.”
Yes, which is why Behe’s Dover statement that “all science is appearances” was so incredibly hilarious. The scientific method is about drawing accurate conclusions *in spite of* appearances and first impressions — the polar opposite of “gee, sure looks designed to me.”
I’m a chemical engineer. Here’s my take:
Engineering is tough – it requires a mathematical approach to a given problem. For most engineers (the ones I went to school with), the courseload is quite demanding, and you have to know your equations and be able to apply them. Many students just start with the formula in tbe beginning of the chapter and look to “plug and chug” to get an unknown.
Now, of course this is second rate thinking. But it happens to be very practical, given the course load and the competition.
The art of setting up the problem is much of the heavy lifting,but you just don’t have TIME to think from first principles all the equations.
Every single class I took, the professor derived the equations, etc. So you’d think we’d know the real thinking behind it. And we loved lecture, and marvelled at the elegant power of a derivation, but when push came to shove and homework was due, and tests were imminent, you have to resort to short-cuts. And big picture thinking went out the window.
Engineering problem sets go from 0 to 100, they do NOT ramp up in difficulty like in math courses.
When I took calc, the first 20 were a cinch, the next 10 so-so, the next 10 demanding. Not so with engineering. YOu’re given 4 problems per topic. How can anyone learn anything after 4 problems? The answer I always got: hey, good point, now turn in your work.
So the problem sets were demanding and required intricate, creative leaps in mathematical insight that a few of us could do without effort but 90% could not.
It just so happens that MANY of the engineers I went to school with at the University of Arizona were Mormon, fundamentalist Christians, etc.
The reason, now, I think this was so was because of the way engineering is set up: a tough subject, with a lot to cover, focused on results – so the thinking through and challenging of first principles quickly fell by the wayside, in order to SOLVE THE PROBLEM, just solve the problem. Turn in the homework, pass the test, ace the quiz.
Accept the formula, LEARN TO APPLY it. Over and over, course after course, that was the dynamic. I was told repeatedly by my profs/TAs that the questions I had were for grad school, not a BS in Chemical Engineering.
So you don’t do Big Picture thinking, you focus on expertly doing Little Picture thinking. And little picture thinking is very tough, not to be dismissed. You have to know what details to select out of a problem’s context. It’s impressive to see people do it. But it’s not prone to questioning frameworks.
The way the discipline is taught (time is short, so accept the formula, learn to apply it in many ways), and the discipline itself (solve problems, don’t create new ones with philosophical, open ended, unsusual questions) both tend to be conservative toward the very frameworks of the discipline.
My other degree, philosophy, was NOTHING BUT challenging one’s own frameworks, so imagine the culture shock…
Because engineering was mathematical and rigorous, but did NOT encourage lifting one’s head up into the fresh air to look around, makes it ideal for intelligent types who can compartmentalize – learn the island’s set of rules, apply them, and keep those rules there.
Expertly applying the rules of a given subdomain is identical to the method of theology – assume there’s a god, then defend it, describe it, elaborate upon it, etc.
But don’t apply the critical tools to the framework, just within it. It happens that the vast majority of people think like this naturally. THe engineers I know are just more rigorous at it.
After all, what is there to gain by jumping into a morass of reflexive, big, potentially unanswerable meta-questions? Not too much, unless you like the vertigo of intellectual confusion. Plato called it aporia, and it is anathema to most engineers I know…
In reply to:
“Engineers are not taught to think critically, or to understand all of the underlying mechanisms of a phenomenon. They are simply taught things as being true, and how to apply that knowledge.”
Bored Huge Krill wrote:
“I’m shocked by that statement. There must be some major disconnects in engineering education going on somewhere. Absent sharply honed critical thinking skills, how could any engineer actually come up with anything genuinely new, or recognize the difference between an unworkable new approach and a great one?”
I wasn’t saying that this describes all engineers, and we did do some experiments in school, but I think that in general this is what differentiates an engineering education from a science one. And I don’t think it necessarily inhibits coming up with new ideas – look how creative children can be without any critical thinking skills. As far as knowing whether or not the ideas will work, that comes down to intuition, based mostly on experience.
And yes, there are definitely engineers to who this doesn’t apply, who still have critical thinking skills even though it wasn’t stressed in the education. I like to think of myself as one. And more research oriented engineers are probably much closer to scientists than design engineers.
Heh- I just refreshed this window before posting this comment, and Steve covered it very nicely.
One more thing –
Stephen Gould’s division of religion and science into two “magisteria” is really the same thing I just said. Keep the two areas fenced off with a long, stiff, artificial epistemological Great Wall that snakes around the fluid and organic real turf and falsely creates two areas where there should be only one.
The scientific method may not be able to answer everything, but it CAN and SHOULD be used to obliterate fundamentalism, which tries to impinge upon the other side of the wall, the realm of the factual, the publicly observable.
Gould’s pompous, fancy terminology leads to milquetoast advocacy of ‘tolerance’ when neither side really is satisfied with this uneasy truce.
Island thinking, ripe for compartmentalization, leads to second rate engineering education, and second rate philosphical thinking as well.
I’ve often wondered about the cause of the Salem Hypothesis. Could it be that, deep down, many engineers are afraid of being replaced by a dumb algorithm? A part of me hopes that they are, just to wipe the know-it-all smirks off their faces. (I study engineering at UMR, and I’ve always been annoyed by the attitude that anyone who’s not an engineering major is too stupid to be an engineer, because who could refuse the starting salary? Nobody with a brain. Haw haw, those biologists who don’t know design when they see it are so retarded.) But I really don’t know for sure; I can’t do their introspection for them. What do you all think?
William Shockley is the prototype engineers using their powers for evil rather than good. He stands as an icon to the fact that one can be a brilliant engineer and a repugnant moron — simultaneously.
I post a link to this every time the observation comes up that there’s a lot of engineers, CS people, and math types who are evolution-deniers. It’s a side-effect of how these disciplines are taught to think about problems and solution spaces.
http://www.greythumb.org/blog/index.php?/archives/7-T.M.T.O.W.T.D.I..html
Enjoy. :)
PaulC wrote:
Nah, what fun would that be? It’s much easier just to assume our prejudices are true so we can spend more time pointing and laughing than actually learning anything.
I know this may seem more random in the context of the other posts here, which I have not had time to read–this is just my two cents in response to the Salem Hypothesis:
I once suggested to the fine folk at answersingenesis.com that their scientists should try to get their ideas across by publishing in refereed journals. Afterall, if their science has any merit, peer review will find it (or not). The response was that their scientists had indeed published in refereed journals, and I was presented with a list of scientists and their areas of specialties and the papers they had written. Although I don’t believe they were all engineers and some may have been biologists (this was years ago, my memory is hazy), what I did notice is that by and large, the scientists were often either experts in a field unrelated to evolution, or the papers themselves were completely unrelated to evolution. No one on the list was published in the field of evolution in a refereed journal. So, misleading, yes. At least their scientists actually are scientists with doctorates in actual science, unrelated though it is, which is more than can be said for scam arteest “Dr.” Kent Hovind (and yet still a very empty claim).
I’ve often wondered about the cause of the Salem Hypothesis.
I can help you out there. The cause of the hypothesis was that somebody proposed it.
Is it just me, or did the quality of critical thinking around here take a sharp nosedive this morning?
A question.
In the Quebec system, all engineers who follow anything like the normal education route in this province will not earn their degree without at least the equivalent of one semester of general biology. (Along with several semesters of math, physics and chemistry, depending on the subfield.)
Is this generally true in the US? (I doubt it.)
Sad to day that when I graduated from UT Austin in ’81, biology was not a requirement for engineers in general. (Although I knew a number of people on a biomedical engineering track.) My last formal exposure was in 9th grade, with a biology teacher who somehow forgot to mention the idea of “common origins” when asking us to memorize a deprecated taxonomy.
UM-Rolla only requires physics and chemistry.
My last biology course was in 10th grade. I don’t remember much of it outside the genetics section we did.
My theory on the Salem Hypothesis is pretty simple: While often engineers will understand some of the basic theoretical underpinings of a process, theory is usually quickly discarded in favor of imperical results. I can’t count how many jokes with the punch line ‘eh, close enough’ I picked up as an undergrad engineer. Engineers focus on how something works instead of why (large generalization). A lot of basic theories like the ideal gas law are just ignored in favor of tables and charts. Because this is the way they are taught, engineers are more prone to develop this fanciful notion that they understand science better than scientists because they see how things work ‘in the real world’. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…
I used to mock engineers, until I became one and worked with them. Sure, there are lazy engineers and not so bright engineers – but there are lazy and not so bright grad students in physics, too, and in about the same proportions. Perhaps the field I am in biases me. I’m always stunned by people who think engineering is about solving equations or fixing machines. Most of what I do has to be analyzed statistically b/c the equations, even when known, are just too damn hard to solve. Hmm.. that sounds a lot like my dissertation project, actually. I work for a semiconductor manufacturer, FWIW. I currently work in reliability. Most people get really confused when I tell them I am a Reliability Engineer. They say, “So is that electrical, mechanical, what?” And then I tell them my degree is physics and they get even more confused. I am coming to the conclusion that most people don’t know what engineering actually is.
I am surprised nobody has proposed a Generalised Salem Hypothesis. On the old Usenet it was noted, especially on the physics threads, that a disproportionate amount of _any_ crackpot type seems to be engineers.
IIRC, the best proposed explanation was something along what NoVA (and steve on education) says. Engineers in most disciplines become experts on making anything work, in areas they may not know much about beforehand. They tend to take that experience into areas where they don’t get the necessary feedback from reality. Of course they fail immediately.
“Back when I worked at Microsoft, there were some software engineers on our team who clearly thought that our users were poorly optimized.”
Heh. It is funny, and it explains a lot! Of course one should set up the market system so the product selects viable customers, instead of vice versa. The Microsoft Way.
I swear if I read one more post of an anecdote puporting to support the hypothesis that “engineers don’t get the scientific method”, my irony meter is going to explode.
I’m half expecting PZ to appear any minute to explain that this was all just an experiment to see if anybody took the bait.
I think I said it at the beginning…
PZ wrote:
Stating the Salem hypothesis was also a good way of stirring the pot
Indeed.
What has shocked me somewhat here is firstly, the number of posters who seem to have instantly mutated the statement of a hypothesis into an accepted factual assertion, and secondly, the mutation of the hypothesis (paraphrased) that “technical IDiots are mostly engineers” into “engineers are mostly IDiots”.
The original post doesn’t strike me as inflammatory. Many of the responses do, entirely because of these two leaps which have somehow been made. As I mentioned before, I can only marvel at the irony, given that the original hypothesis was about grasp of the scientific method.
By the way, in terms of a test for this hypothesis, what would you propose as a reasonable sample to examine? Perhaps we could start with the fellows of the Discovery institute?
As a software guy myself… Well, being a software guy really has zippo to do with my observation.
Animate objects, like people and bacteria, are fundamentally biological in nature. They got here through reproduction of person A and person B, or however reproduction works for some given species.
On the other hand, inanimate objects, like Rushmore, are NOT here as a result of reproduction; Mountain A and Mountain B did not unite in reproductive bliss and produce Rushmore; some people went up there and carved it.
My point? Biology is biology, and engineering is engineering. Biological entities are here as a result of biology; engineered features are here because biological entities designed them. Now, I’m a pretty good software guy. Really, I do alright. But I’d feel uncomfortable telling PZ how cells divide. Hopefully, he’d feel uncomfortable lecturing on computational complexity or parser classes.
I wouldn’t go to an EE magazine to learn about evolution any more than I’d go to a car magazine to learn about basketball. Unless it’s for entertainment.
I’m struggling to learn about evolution myself. I want to absorb this. These EE smackdowns are undeniably entertaining, but in the end, aren’t very meaningful.
By the way, I think DaveScot is a PERFECT example of the Salem Hypothesis. I am very surprised no one seems to have noticed this.
Dave knows everything about everything.
I have another term to describe this: Know-it-all.
I was not familiar with the Salem hypothesis but, in fact, my first ID encounter was with an engineer.
I had gotten to know him in a business start-up class we were taking and he asked if I would be willing to address a group (of mostly engineers) he belonged to and answer some general questions about evolution with regard to some new scientific theories. I hadn’t heard of ID (this was 3 or 4 years ago) and told him I wasn’t really aware of any new theories but sure I would take a look at the information he had.
He brought this DVD over to our house, and try as I did to be polite, when the whole drawing in the sand on the beach and Mount Rushmore examples of ‘design’ were presented – I lost it.
I hadn’t laughed that hard in quite some time. He stayed for a little while afterward and we discussed the fact that evolution was not a random process, etc. -I even told him a little about hox genes. Before he left I said he was welcome to contact me if he still wanted me to speak to his group but that I wouldn’t be saying anything that would lend any credence to this ID nonsense. He never called.
OK, so MDs, DDSs, Vets, BEs, PhDs in the Arts, PHDs in Mathematics, etc., are not Scientists.
Anybody have a guess on what the ratio of folks in those categories to folks with a PhD in Science is?
The LilLeaguer Hypothesis is, FWIW, that if somebody has an advanced technical degree, that person is not a Scientist.
Maybe some of them are “theological engineers”?
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Jul/theology.html
:-P
If we’re in the mood for generalisations, as an engineer myself, I have to say that any engineer who believes in divine creation of biological organisms is an idiot.
A great deal of engineering is about working within constraints. Component A has the best performance but we can’t afford it so we have to modify component B and use that; it would be optimal to route this thing through here, but it needs to be somewhere where it can be accessed for maintenance, so it has to go there instead. And so forth.
But if God did it all, what constraints does he have to worry about?
There is a history to engineers, creationism and evolution. One of the strongest critiques of Darwin’s work came from engineer Fleeming Jenkins. Perhaps more relevant to the topic at hand is that old-earth creationism (as a movement since the 1960s) was launched by Henry Morris, who had a PhD in hydraulic engineering.
I think it has something to do with the centrality of design in engineering (or at least mechanical engineering, I?m not sure about things like chemical engineering). Engineers are taught design as a way of thinking and approaching problems. So it probably isn?t too surprising that engineers are prone to see design in the biological world.
FOR SALE
One irony meter (for parts only; non functional)
Kristine writes: A lot of creationists also seem to be veterinarians. What’s up with that?
I suspect it’s not just coincidental that Ag schools (such as Texas A & M) tend to have large engineering and veterinary programs, and to be hotbeds of conservatism.
Not that I think the causality goes one way; I think there’s a critical mass of conservative not-terribly-progressive-or-intellectual thought at ag schools, such that the center shifts to the right, and a bit down.
Of course, such schools (including Texas A & M) produce many fine scientists and engineers. (And, I’m sure, some darned good and reasonable vets.) Many people who go to such schools are reasonably immune to the right-and-down trend. But whenever you shift the distribution, the number of people on the tail you shift toward gets strikingly larger. So you get way more outright nuts on that end, even if they’re still a pretty small minority.
Which pseudo-explains Deutsch at NASA, as well as the highly visible minority of engineers and vets who are vocal creationists.
Or maybe I’m just a liberal on crack. Anybody got relevant data? (It might be interesting to look at the school affiliations as well as the disciplines of the “500 odd scientists” who signed the DI statement.)
Yikes… I guess I have been deluding myself. I thought the work I did defining congizance in three populations of technicians with three different native languages (in three countries) when applied to technical instructions for complex processes with no less than 106 steps was getting somewhere… It seemed like such a great DOE. It was certainly more exciting than developing a low density dielectric for marking printed circuits.
Thanks. My company will be glad to know that I am too friggin’ stupid to understand the process of observation, data gathering, statistical analysis and technical writing. Whew… and big picture thinking. To think I setup the DOE myself! Glad to find out now, before I waste too much of my lifetime on futile pursuits.
I know.. I’ll find a quiet town somewhere out West. I’ll become a Jehovah’s Witness. I can print those cheesy flyers they hand out… Oops! Can I do that guys? Or is it too technical for me? You’ll have to decide. You’re the experts!
The evidence for the Salem Hypothesis may still be available, anecdotal though it is. I followed usenet from fairly early times and remember the Great Joining (with ARPANET). The talk.origins group was created because it was noise for the scientific signal on the evolution froup (sci.bio evolution?). Usenet in those days consisted of Bell sites, universities and a few tech firms. The protypical creationist was a guy at Bell Labs raised as a fundamentalist who was totally incredulous that people accepted evolution so casually and trying to straighten people out. I don’t think they changed their minds, but some of them got the idea that there was evidence for evolution. One or two were very arrogant that since they could solve all important software problems with the decks of punch cards they’d saved over the years, they could deal with trivial confusions like evolution. In the engineers’ favor, they generally presented clear arguments. Only later, with the inclusion of riff-raff from public isp’s were there people with a primarily religious axe to grind. Most became frustrated and stopped posting after a few days. A few became permanent trolls. I don’t think many were engineers.
It would be interesting to go back and tabulate the creationists posters by time and occupation. I think there was something to the SH. I remember that when Bruce published it, I had an “aha” experience. It may be that numbers wouldn’t reveal much, and that there was something special about the early Bell Lab guys. But engineering was part of it.
I thought I should summarize a few of my thoughts arising from many comments on this thread…
Some of the comments surprise me, and I must say I’m disappointed. There seems to be a good deal of assumption and arrogance weaved into many of the comments here.
I’ll start with a brief rebuttal to some of that:
Let’s suppose, for example, that an engineer has to meet with representatives of DoD and FCC and explain to them why a new wireless communication system they’ve just built won’t interfere with a missile-tracking radar system. Do you think that, say, stating either:
“I don’t have any hard data, but I’ve got some anecdotal evidence” or
“I don’t fully understand how this works, but I plugged some numbers into this formula I got out of a book, and it seems ok” or
“Intuitively, based on experience, I don’t think there’s a problem”
would be considered acceptable?
This is the kind of thing that real engineers – those that actually build stuff – have to deal with every day. It’s because of the need to deal with stuff like this that all of the engineers I know (and I know a great many) have no difficulty whatsoever in seeing the sloppy logic and handwaving espoused by the likes of Behe and Dembski for exactly what it is.
I’m not suggesting that all engineers can meet such a standard. What I’m asking is whether it’s fair to make blanket statements that start with “Engineers think that…” that I’ve seen much of here.
Please. Science and engineering is a very big space. The “we know what we’re talking about and those guys are stupid” mindset is precisely the problem. A little more respect for all those involved in disciplies other than our own would go a long way.
PZ’s original post was about an old usenet hypothesis. I have no problem with that. The presumption of the correctness of that hypothesis, coupled with application of “all cats have four legs, my dog has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat” logic, however, has me rolling my eyes. For all those posters who followed that line, I have to ask: “how do you think that makes you look?”.
There’s enough BS out there without creating a bunch more through mindless mud-slinging. Please, pretty please, just give it a rest.
Allen may be onto something here…
I don’t believe it!
As an ENgineering M.Sc. I expect to find evidence of workings, and some sort of proof. I must admit my first degree is in Physics, but even so …
No.
Besides, evoultion is soooo ELEGANT.
Sorry about the typos!
I’m a mechanical engineer and I wonder if it isn’t that a majority of engineers are creationists rather that a lot of loud mouth creationists are engineers (unfortunately). To me a good engineer is taught to solve problems by gathering evidence and figuring the way to solve a problem. I’m currently in finance and IT at the moment and a high number of successful people in these fields tend to be engineers.
One of the reasons for the engineer personality is probably due to the undergraduate study (at least in Australia). Engineers get stuck into their subjects very quickly and in great depth. There is a very high failure rate in the early years. By third year only the people that should be there are there. People doing science tend to cover a very broad range of subjects in less depth. So when engineers do a physics subject for example they tend to find it a lot easier than the engineering that they are doing and so feel a little superior. This is saying NOTHING about the difficulty of post grad study.
I am an engineer (Computer Systems Engineer) who works at a large U.S. engineering firm, where I have worked for over 15 years, so I’ve seen a large number of engineers come and go. My view of the large number of engineers who believe in creationism is this: if you are a mathematically-inclined, technically-inclined, and/or at least partially scientifically-inclined kid from a family that believes in creationism, engineering offers you a path where you can use your talents without having to accept some of the philosophical consequences of the sciences. In other words, you can use physics (say, E&M) without having to accept that physics also has led to strong evidence for a very ancient universe with little or no evidence for an intelligent creator.
My guess is the same sort of thing goes for MDs.
One side note: where I work, fundamentalist Christians now are a distinct minority, since most of the employees now come from India, China, or Europe. However, I would say that fundamentalist Christians still make up the majority of the American-born engineers.
first of all: there are more engineers than there are scientists, so one would expect more crackpots to be engineers, and second: I don’t know whether it’s true in general, but at least one engineer I know personally (as a matter of fact he’s my roommate) is a young earth creationist, but is very intellegent other than that. Acceptance of creationist nonesence has more to do with ignorance of biology and willingness to turn off reason in the name of religion then intellegence.
Anecdotal experience you are completely free to dismiss that support the hypothesis:
When I get in a debate with Creationists, the ones who do bring up their educational background usually claim to be engineers.
Entirely Appropriate Criticisms: No controls against confirmation bias. No controls against retrospective falsification.
Alternate hypothesis: Creationists who loudly tout their engineering backgrounds are incompetent engineers. I recall some studies showing that competence and confidence in one’s competence often show an inverse relationship.
To the person that’s upset by people sharing anecdotes, as opposed to citing hard data – these are responses on a blog, what more do you want. If I’m going to write an original essay, I’ll do more research, but in responding on someone else’s blog, anecdotes are about all I have time for. And I don’t think anyone takes these anecdotes as proof – we’re just having fun discussing this topic.
As far as the logic of “all cats have four legs, my dog has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat,” I don’t think anybody was trying to say that most engineers are creationists/IDists/stupid. What was being pointed out was the difference in education between scientists and engineers, and how that could lead to a higher (small) percentage of engineers compared to scientists accepting certain theories without looking closely at the supporting evidence. I think Steve’s post about his education at the University of Arizona coverred this education aspect the best. And I don’t know that everybody’s comments here are in response to the Salem Hypothesis – this was something I’d noticed about the engineering mindset long before I ever heard of the hypothesis, or even before I started getting into the evolution/creationism debate.
Concerning the engineer defending their work to the government using one of the three arguments, “I don’t have any hard data, but I’ve got some anecdotal evidence” or “I don’t fully understand how this works, but I plugged some numbers into this formula I got out of a book, and it seems ok” or “Intuitively, based on experience, I don’t think there’s a problem”. Well, yes, the first one is obviously no good, but the other two, maybe not in so many words, are exactly how the engineer would defend their work. I won’t try to get into electrical engineering, since that’s outside my expertise, but if I was going to submit a proposal to build an airplane, I’d probably show an analysis with lift, drag, stress, weight, etc. Do I understand exactly how all of those phenomena work? No. Take lift for example – I know that it’s caused by deflecting air downwards, and the resulting pressure distribution this creates on the wing surface, but why exactly does the airflow stay attached to the top of the wing, and not just separate like it would for a flat plate or a sphere. I know this tending to remain attached is called the Coanda effect, but that just gives it a name – it doesn’t increase the understanding. But I don’t need to know that to design an airplane. As long as I know that airfoils work, the trends of how different thicknesses & cambers affect the lift, drag, & moment curves, and the drag divergence characteristics, that’s as much understanding as I need. And to the last argument of relying on experience, yes, that would also help in a proposal. One of the books I have on my desk (Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach, Daniel P. Raymer), along with a lot of other good information, lists many of the historical trends for aircraft. Usually, those are used a starting points in a design, before you’ve gone through most of the analysis. But, when defending the design to someone else, having a design that’s in-line with historical trends does lend some credibility to your design. I’d be very skeptical if Boeing said it was going to design a new airplane with an empty weight fraction half of what most current designs can do.
I realize that “engineering,” like “science,” can cover a lot of different areas, that these generalizations don’t apply to all engineers, and that engineering and science overlap, so that the distinction between the two can become blurred. But at least in my specific field of aeronautical design engineering, most of what I do doesn’t require in depth understanding of the underlying principles. I’d write more about how we actually do engineering in my workplace, but this reply’s already getting long enough, and it would still only be “anecdotal.”
On a lighter note, here’s my favorite engineering joke:
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all given identical rubber balls and told to find the volume. They are given anything they want to measure it, and have all the time they need. The mathematician pulls out a measuring tape and records the circumference. He then divides by two times pi to get the radius, cubes that, multiplies by pi again, and then multiplies by four-thirds and thereby calculates the volume. The physicist gets a beaker, places 1.00000 gallons of water in it, drops in the ball, and measures the displacement to six significant figures.The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball table.
Well, excuse me if hearing engineers all around me constantly say that “scientists are idiots” (actual quote) for accepting evolution tends to foster my own politically-incorrect prejudices against engineers. Sheesh.
Well, yes, the first one is obviously no good, but the other two, maybe not in so many words, are exactly how the engineer would defend their work.
Actually, it wasn’t a hypothetical scenario.
“Allen may be onto something here…”
Vaguely. He makes some distinctions between physical and biological sciences. But he is making mistakes and the distinctions are not so severe that he makes them. I think will leave a comment on that there.
Nevertheless, the distinctions may influence mindsets, as it apparently influences his.
Well, excuse me if hearing engineers all around me constantly say that “scientists are idiots” (actual quote) for accepting evolution tends to foster my own politically-incorrect prejudices against engineers. Sheesh.
just a guess, but presumably on being subjected to such nonsense your reaction would be to:
a) think that the perpetrators of such remarks were arrogant, ignorant and pig-headed for having arrived at such a sweeping conclusion based (presumably) on nothing more than predjudice and anecdote?
b) think that that kind of attitude really doesn’t help anybody; it only perpetuates ignorance to think that all the smart people and therefore all of the answers are within one’s own peer group?
c) be minded to maybe point some of that out to them?
just a guess, of course.
I’m not so certain about physics, but I do know that he portrays chemistry as being a lot “cleaner” than it actually is. He seems to be describing nineteeth-century chemistry more than twenty-first century chemistry.
I like that a lot. I’ll have to use it soon.
It’s funny, because there is a kernel of truth to the stereotype. Perhaps because I work at the convergence of several fields (HW, SW, information theory, image processing, science of human visual perception), and work with an international cast of characters, I take “Engineers are …” statements with a metric ton of salt.
And PZ, thanks for the link.
BronzeDog said:
Here is one such study: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)
“I think a lot of scientists in the biological fields do not fully realize how counter-intuitive the idea of evolution is.”
To whom? It always made perfect sense to me, and that was before I studied it.
Let’s not lump MDs into this hypothesis, please. The prerequisites for admission to medical school include a thorough study of basic general biology; and (of course)training for medicine involves the study advanced human biology and physiology- including genetics. If there is a large and vocal group of MDs supporting this pap, it’s a sign that its massive native stupidity has overcome a huge amount of specific and advanced science education.
And in case anyone doubts that I know whereof I speak, both my parents are MDs, and I’m a liberal-arts major who’s now interviewing for medical school.
horribly late to the debate, but I can’t help but think….
maybe the reason so many Creationists wanting to be thought ‘scientifically credible’ claim to be engineers is because engineering is an extremely public science with a specific name for it’s practictioners — unlike, say, medical research, where every one is Dr. Creationists seem to like to label things, and ‘engineer’ does seem to be the simplest clearly scientfic label one can give oneself.
Perhaps they’re simply fibbing.
I used to just take evolution as the better theory – it seemed more intelligent than some old dude in the sky “smoting” people and what-not.
Later, in grad school (environmental engineering) I took a class on global biogeochemistry from the environmental science department. I learned enough about evolutionary science to realize how little I’d ever learned about the subject. That class also made me realize how different education is between science and engineering.
With that said, I’ve definitely met my fair share of highly conservative engineers. Some are nice and not assholes despite our differences of opinion – but the ones most likely to get into such an argument were utterly arrogant and, yes, not so bright. Also, a lot of engineers are subject to a lot of ego-stroking – both within the field and by the industries that support our work. Some people, unfortunately, get confused and start to believe they posess a superior intelligence.
Of course, I once met a geologist who didn’t believe in global warming, so scientists are subject to the same phenomena ;)